R m cummings edmund spencer the critical heritage the collected critical heritage medieval romance 1996

Even before thepublication of the Faerie Queene 1590, the Shepheardes Calender appeared twice more in 1581 and in 1586, and Harvey had given the publisherBynneman a correspondence betwee

EDMUND SPENSER: THE CRITICAL

HERITAGE

General Editor: B.C.Southam

The Critical Heritage series collects together a large body of criticism on majorfigures in literature Each volume presents the contemporary responses to aparticular writer, enabling the student to follow the formation of critical attitudes

to the writer’s work and its place within a literary tradition

The carefully selected sources range from landmark essays in the history ofcriticism to fragments of contemporary opinion and little published documentarymaterial, such as letters and diaries

Significant pieces of criticism from later periods are also included in order todemonstrate fluctuations in reputation following the writer’s death

EDMUND SPENSER

THE CRITICAL HERITAGE

Edited by R.M.CUMMINGS

London and New York

This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005.

“To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of

thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.”

All rights reserved No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced

or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording,

or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in

writing from the publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

ISBN 0-203-19551-5 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 0-203-19554-X (Adobe eReader Format) ISBN 0-415-13402-1 (Print Edition)

TO MY MOTHER AND FATHER

The reception given to a writer by his contemporaries and near-contemporaries isevidence of considerable value to the student of literature On one side we learn agreat deal about the state of criticism at large and in particular about thedevelopment of critical attitudes towards a single writer; at the same time,through private comments in letters, journals or marginalia, we gain an insightupon the tastes and literary thought of individual readers of the period Evidence

of this kind helps us to understand the writer’s historical situation, the nature ofhis immediate reading-public, and his response to these pressures

The separate volumes in the Critical Heritage Series present a record of this

early criticism Clearly for many of the highly-productive and lengthily-reviewednineteenth- and twentieth-century writers, there exists an enormous body ofmaterial ; and in these cases the volume editors have made a selection of the mostimportant views, significant for their intrinsic critical worth or for theirrepresentative quality—perhaps even registering incomprehension!

For earlier writers, notably pre-eighteenth century, the materials are muchscarcer and the historical period has been extended, sometimes far beyond thewriter’s lifetime, in order to show the inception and growth of critical viewswhich were initially slow to appear

In each volume the documents are headed by an Introduction, discussing thematerial assembled and relating the early stages of the author’s reception to what

we have come to identify as the critical tradition The volumes will makeavailable much material which would otherwise be difficult of access and it ishoped that the modern reader will be thereby helped towards an informedunderstanding of the ways in which literature has been read and judged

B.C.S

(a) From Three Letters (1580)

(b) From Two Other Letters (1580)

(c) The Letter of Ralegh (1590)

(a) From the Marginalia (after 1580)

(b) From Three Letters (1580)

(c) From Three Letters (1580)

(d) Commendatory Verses (1590)

(e) From Four Letters (1592)

(f) From Four Letters (1592)

(g) From Four Letters (1592)

(h) From Four Letters (1592)

(i) From A New Letter (1593)

(j) From Pierces Supererogation (1593)

(k) From Pierces Supererogation (1593)

(l) From Pierces Supererogation (1593)

4 WILLIAM WEBBE, from A Discourse of English Poetry

(1586)

47

(a) From Greene’s Menaphon (1589)

(b) From Pierce Penilesse (1592)

(c) From Have With You to Saffron-Waldon (1596)

6 GEORGE PUTTENHAM, from The Arte of English Poesie

12 WILLIAM VALLANS, from A Tale of Two Swannes (1590) 60

13 THOMAS WATSON, from the Elegy on Walsingham (1590) 61

14 JOHN FLORIO, from Florios Second Frutes (1591) 63

(a) From Orlando Furioso (1591)

(b) From Epigrams (c 1600)

(a) From Delia (1592)

(b) From Delia and Rosamond Augmented (1594)

(c) From The Civill Wars (1599)

(d) From Musophilus (1599)

(e) From Musophilus (1599)

(a) From Churchyards Challenge (1593)

(b) From Churchyards Charitie (1595)

(a) From Idea (1593)

(b) From Endimion and Phoebe (1595)

(c) From The Barrons Wars (1603)

(d) From Poems Lyrick and Pastoral (1605)

(e) From Poly-Olbion (1612)

(a) From Phillis (1593)

(b) From Wits Miserie (1596)

20 I.O., from The Lamentation of Troy (1594) 77

23 THOMAS EDWARDS, three extracts from Cephalus and

Procris (1595)

80

(a) From The First Day (1595)

(b) From Devine Weekes and Workes (1605)

25 CHARLES FITZGEOFFREY, from Sir Francis Drake (1596) 83

(a) From Virgidemiarum (1597)

(b) From Virgidemiarum (1597)

(c) From Bedell’s A Protestant Memorial (c 1605)

(d) Poem on Spenser, Sidney, and Camden (c 1610)

(a) From The Excellencie of the English Tongue (c 1595)

ix

(b) From A Herrings Tale (1598)

29 FRANCIS MERES, from Palladis Tamia (1598) 90

30 THOMAS SPEGHT, from The Workes of Chaucer (1598) 92

(a) From Epigrammes (1599)

Obituary Verse

(b) From Faunus and Melliflora (1600)

(c) From The Mirror of Martyres (1601)

32 WILLIAM ALABASTER, from Epigrammata (1600) 97

33 NICHOLAS BRETON, from Melancholike Humours (1600) 98

34 JOHN CHALKHILL, from Thealma and Clearchus (c 1600) 100

35 I.F., from Weever’s Faunus and Melliflora (1600) 101

36 HUGH HOLLAND, On Spencer the Poett (c 1600) 102

37 FRANCIS THYNNE, from Emblemes and Epigrames (1600) 103

38 FRANCIS BEAUMONT, from Poems (after 1600) 104

39 CHARLES FITZGEOFFREY, from Affaniae (1601) 105

40 WILLIAM BASSE, from Three Pastoral Elegies (1602) 108

42 WILLIAM WARNER, from A Continuance (1606) 111

47 SIR JOHN ROE, from Epistle to Sir Nicholas Smith (c 1605) 118

48 LODOWICK BRYSKETT, from A Discourse of Civill Life

(1606)

119

49 THOMAS DECKER, from A Knights Conjuring (1607) 122

50 SIR JOHN STRADLING, from Epigrammatum Libri Quatuor

(1607)

123

51 RICHARD NICCOLS, from Englands Eliza (1610) 124

52 HENRY STANFORD, Verses to Lady Hunsdon (1610) 125

56 E.JOHNSON, from Browne’s Shepheards Pipe (1614) 129

57 JOHN NORDEN, from The Labyrinth of Mans Life (1614) 130

58 TRISTRAM WHITE, from The Martyrdom of Saint George

(1614)

131

59 THOMAS COLLINS, from The Teares of Love (1615) 132

60 WILLIAM BROWNE, from Britannia s Pastorals (1616) 133

(a) From The Golden Age Restored (1616)

(b) From Conversations with Drummond (1619)

(c) From Timber (1640)

63 John Lane (1617, 1621) 139

(a) From Guy of Warwick (1617)

(b) From Tritons Trumphet (1621)

64 WILLIAM DRUMMOND, from Heads of a Conversation

(1619)

141

65 ROBERT AYLETT, from The Song of Songs (1621) 142

66 ROBERT BURTON, from Anatomy of Melancholy (1621,

1632)

144

67 ALEXANDER GILL, from Logonomia Anglica (1621) 147

68 WILLIAM MASON, from A Handfull of Essaies (1621) 148

xi

69 ROBERT SALTER, from Wonderful Prophecies (1626) 150

70 WILLIAM LISLE, from Virgil’s Eclogues (1628) 151

(a) Discourse (before 1628?)

(a) From Il Penseroso (1631?)

(b) From Against Smectymnuus (1641)

(c) From The Reason of Church-government (1641)

(d) From An Apology (1642)

(e) From Areopagitica (1644)

(f) From Eikonoklastes (1649)

76 E.G., from Vindiciae Virgilianae (after 1632) 168

77 PHINEAS FLETCHER, from The Purple Island (1633) 169

78 ROBERT JEGON, Spencero Posthumo (c 1633) 172

79 RALPH KNEVETT, from A Supplement (c 1633) 173

(a) From Devotionis Augustinianae Flamma (before 1634)

(b) From Haec Homo (before 1634)

(a) From Platonica (1642)

(b) From Conjectura Cabbalistica (1653)

(c) From The Grand Mystery of Godliness (1660)

(d) From Philosophical Writings (1662)

(e) From The Apology (1664)

(a) From The Times Displayed (1646)

(b) From Epigrams (1651)

(c) From The Faerie King (c 1655)

(d) From The Faerie King (c 1655)

86 MATHIAS PRIDEAUX, from An Easy and Compendious

89 R.C., from The Chast and Lost Lovers (1651) 193

91 SIR ROBERT SOUTHWELL, from his Commonplace Book

(c 1654)

195

92 SIR RICHARD FANSHAWE, from The Lusiad (1655) 196

93 SAMUEL HOLLAND, from Don Zara del Fogo (1656) 197

94 SIR ASTON COCKAYNE, from Small Poems (1658) 198

The Period 1660–1715

95 JOHN WORTHINGTON, Letter to Samuel Hartlib (1660) 201

96 SIR JOHN DENHAM, from Poems and Translations 1668) 203

97 EDWARD PHILLIPS, from Tractulus de Carmine Dramatico

99 RICHARD GRAHAM, from Angliae Speculum Morale

(1670)

206

(a) From The Conquest of Granada (1672)

(b) From The Spanish Fryar (1681)

(c) From The Satires of Juvenal (1693)

(d) From De Arte Graphica (1695)

(e) From The Works of Virgil (1697)

(f) From The Works of Virgil (1697)

(g) From Fables Ancient and Modern (1700)

(h) From The Art of Poetry, with SIR WILLIAM SOAME (1683)

103 SAMUEL WOODFORD, from A Paraphrase Upon the

Canticles (1679)

213

104 JOHN CHATWIN, A Pastoral Elegy (c 1680) 215

105 THOMAS D’URFEY, from Sir Barnaby Whigg (1681) 217

106 HENRY KEEPE, from Monumenta Westmonasteriensa

110 The Preface to Spenserus Redivivus (1687) 222

112 SIR WILLIAM TEMPLE, from Upon Poetry (1690) 228

(a) From An Account of the Greatest English Poets (1694)

(b) From The Spectator No 62 (1711)

(c) From The Spectator No 183 (1711)

(d) From The Spectator No 297 (1712)

(e) From The Spectator No 419 (1712)

(a) From Prince Arthur (1695)

(a) From The Usefulness of the Stage (1698)

(b) From The Grounds of Criticism (1704)

(c) From The Grounds of Criticism (1704)

(d) From Remarks upon Mr Pope’s Homer (1717)

119 SAMUEL WESLEY, from The Life of our Blessed Lord

(1697)

238

120 SAMUEL COBB, from Poetae Britannici (c 1700) 239

121 HENRY HALL, from Luctus Britannici (1700) 240

(a) From A Discourse on Pastoral Poetry (1704?)

(b) From The Guardian No 40 (1713)

(a) From An Ode (1706)

(b) From Solomon (c 1708)

(a) From The Tatler No 194 (1710)

(b) From The Spectator No 540 (1712)

xv

128 LEONARD WELSTED, from Longinus on the Sublime

(1712)

252

129 HENRY FELTON, from A Dissertation (1713) 254

130 THOMAS PARNELL, from Essay on the Different Styles of

Poetry (1713)

255

131 JOHN HUGHES, from the 1715 edition of Spenser 256

Language and Style

(a) From the Marginalia (1580 and after)

(b) From Two Other Letters (1580)

133 SIR PHILIP SIDNEY, from The Defence of Poesie (c 1583) 283

134 ABRAHAM FRAUNCE, from The Lawiers Logike (1588) 284

135 HENRY PEACHAM, from The Garden of Eloquence (1593) 285

136 HADRIAN DORRELL, from Willobie his Auisa (1594) 286

137 SIR JOHN HARINGTON, from The Metamorphosis ofAiax

(1596)

287

138 WILLIAM LISLE, from Part of Du Bartas (c 1596) 288

140 FRANCIS BEAUMONT, from the Letter to Speght (1598) 290

141 CHARLES BUTLER, from Rhetoricae Libri Duo (1598) 291

142 EVERARD GUILPIN, from Skialetheia (1598) 293

143 A note on Spenser’s failure to write ‘trew Hexameters’ (1599) 294

145 RICHARD CAREW, from The Suruey of Cornwall (1602) 296

146 EDMUND BOLTON, from Hypercritica (c 1618) 297

147 ALEXANDER GILL, from Logonomia Anglica (1621) 298

149 NATHANIEL STERRY, from A Direction (c 1650) 300

150 JOHN DAVIES, from The Extravagant Shepherd (1653) 301

(a) From The Brittish Princes (1669)

(b) From Caroloiades (1689)

152 SIR THOMAS CULPEPPER, from Essayes (1671) 304

153 EDWARD PHILLIPS, from Theatrum Poetarum (1675) 305

154 JOHN OLDHAM, from Horace His Art of Poetry (1681) 306

(a) From Sylvae (1685)

(b) From The Satires of Juvenal (1693)

(c) From The Works of Virgil (1697)

156 FRANCIS ATTERBURY, from Waller’s Poems (1690) 309

157 JAMES HARRINGTON, from Athenae Oxonienses (1691) 310

158 SIR THOMAS POPE BLOUNT, from De Re Poetica (1694) 311

(a) From Of Style (1698)

(b) From the 1715 edition of Spenser

(c) From the 1715 edition of Spenser

160 LUKE MILBOURNE, from Notes on Dryden’s Virgil (1698) 316

161 RICHARD BENTLEY, from A Dissertation (1699) 317

162 SAMUEL WESLEY, from An Epistle to a Friend (1700) 318

164 EDWARD BYSSHE, from The Art of English Poetry (1708) 320

165 WILLIAM COWARD, from Licentia Poetica (1709) 321

(b) From Annales Rerum Anglicarum (1615)

170 ROBERT JOHNSTON, from Historia Rerum Britannicarum

(before 1639)

330

171 THOMAS FULLER, from The Worthies of England (1662) 332

172 JOHN AUBREY, from Brief Lives (up to 1697) 334

173 EDWARD PHILLIPS, from Theatrum Poetarum (1675) 336

175 WILLIAM WINSTANLEY, from England’s Worthies (1684) 340

176 GEORGE SANDYS, from Anglorum Speculum (1684) 343

177 THOMAS BLOUNT, from De Re Poetica (1694) 344

178 JOHN HUGHES, from the 1715 edition of Spenser 347

179 ADDENDUM: G.W.SENIOR and G.W.T., from Amoretti

(1595)

354

To F.I.Carpenter’s A Reference Guide to Edmund Spenser (Chicago, 1923) and

to Dorothy F.Atkinson’s Edmund Spenser: A Bibliographical Supplement

(Baltimore, 1937) I am necessarily indebted I am fortunate in being able toexpress a yet larger debt to the generosity of Professor William Wells of theUniversity of North Carolina, who put at my disposal the typescript of the long

projected Spenser Allusion Book There is very little indeed that I can add to the

labours of its contributors Professors Heffner, Padelford, and Wells are thosewho in succession have taken responsibility for the book, but the massivecontribution of Miss Dorothy Mason (now of the Folger Library) cannot go un-noticed here Miss Mason was also kind enough to answer an enquiry for me.For advice, encouragement, and for supplying valuable references, I am grateful

to Dr Alastair Fowler of Brasenose College, Oxford, to Professor J.C.Bryce ofGlasgow University, and to Mr R.M.Wilding of Sydney University Dr vanDorsten of the Sir Thomas Browne Institute at Leyden, and the Rector of LincolnCollege, Oxford, kindly answered specific enquiries For other advice I thankMiss Hannah Buchan, and Mr Nigel Alexander, both of Glasgow The University

of Glasgow has been generous in its contributions towards my expenses

The original spelling of the passages gathered here has been preserved, thoughshort ‘s’ has in all cases been substituted for long References to modern editions

of works cited have been given only for convenience of consultation: nowherehave I attempted a bibliography of reprintings All enclosures in square bracketsare editorial Where continuity of sense is not at risk, line references have beensubstituted for quotations from Spenser and certain other easily accessibleauthors

Original footnotes are indicated by a star (★), dagger (†), etc

Variorum Spenser The Works of Edmund Spenser: A Variorum Edition

(Baltimore, 1932–49)

ELH Journal of English Literary History

HLB Huntington Library Bulletin

HLQ Huntington Library Quarterly

MLN Modern Language Notes

MP Modern Philology

N &Q Notes and Queries

PQ Philological Quarterly

RES Review of English Studies

PMLA Publications of the Modern Language Association

IThis book ends at a point where it might well begin ‘Before 1715’, writesWilliam Mueller, ‘we have little more than a series of incidental remarks onSpenser… John Hughes, in the critical essays of the 1715 edition, was the firstwriter to consider the sum of Spenser’s work, and not merely fragments of it.’1 Noone could argue with that Individually the passages printed in this book areunlikely to yield any but an incidental interest Collectively, they are, I hope, in avariety of ways interesting and useful In particular, they may draw attention toemphases in Spenserian criticism, from which the modern reader has generallybeen drawn away There is almost nothing even in the best of the followingpages (excepting the pieces by Hughes), which a modern critic wouldspontaneously have thought of saying That is, the seventeenth-century and thetwentieth-century impressions of Spenser’s work are very different There is,moreover, very little on the following pages which a modern critic would eventhink worthwhile saying The only real argument against the notion that most ofthe passages printed here are critically useless is to point to the unlikelihood of

so many clever and learned men having written nonsense It will not do topretend that they were blinkered, that they could never see beyond their ownimmediate concerns, or beyond Cicero or beyond Bossu While the modernreader and critic is so isolated from the perceptions (and the ordering of thoseperceptions) of those closest to Spenser in time and presumably in sympathies,his ground is not the safest On the other hand, the fragmentary character of most

of what is printed here is not something which can be properly apologized for atall It is merely unfortunate It can however be said that there is no English poet

of the period on whom more extended comment would be available In Italy oreven in France it would have been different But in England the criticism ofvernacular poetry was simply not such an industry then as it was on the Continent.That does not make its errors (when it is certain that they are errors) more those

of folly than of carelessness; and it is not in the main an underdevelopeddiscipline in any but a quantitative sense In the circumstances it is remarkable

that Spenser so early attracted as much critical attention as he did—a good dealmore than, say, Shakespeare.

The material offered here, with the exception of chiefly linguistic or chieflybiographical comment, has been arranged chronologically On the suppositionthat readers will probably find it more convenient to have all criticisms by anyone author set together (for example, those by Harvey, Drayton, or Dryden),even when they must be dated very differently, I have broken the chronologicalarrangement to accommodate all such pieces under one heading As well asbeing more convenient, this sophistication of the arrangement also provides amore coherent perspective on the material: the criticisms of Dryden, forexample, are determined more by his own preoccupations than by his reading ofother critics The three larger sections (covering the periods 1579–1600, 1600–

1660, 1660–1715) into which all this material falls are fluid (Drayton forexample is included in the first, but writes more about Spenser after 1600 thanbefore), but contain material of roughly similar character The following pages

of the Introduction explain what general trends obtain within those periods Theseparate grouping of two specialized kinds of comment should not disturb thegeneral reader There is enough cross-referencing to ensure that he missesnothing For those specifically interested in the development of Spenser’sbiography, or in the history of the English language, the gathering together ofbiographical notices and of linguistic or stylistic comment has such immediateand pressing advantages as to make worth while the disturbance of anystraightforward arrangement Readers who wish to consult the collection oflinguistic comment are advised that where material which might properly havebeen set there forms part of some more general discussion, it has been left in thebody of the book References to such material have been provided at thebeginning of the section

The brief introductory essay which immediately follows is intended only asthe most generalized kind of guide It attempts no extended discussion of any ofthe passages included in the book, but is meant rather to organize a selection ofpoints into some rough historical pattern Notions rather different from my owncould, I have no doubt, be substantiated from the same evidence

IIHISTORY OF PUBLICATION

Spenser’s first essay in print, the translations for Van der Noot’s Theatre (1569),

went neglected in his time, and except for the brief and often reluctant

observations of scholars more recently, have been ever since His second, The

Shepheardes Calender (1579), won its author immediate fame—though it was

not generally known who the author was2—and in Spenser’s own lifetime wentthrough five editions That those editions were printed with successively inferiortexts is from a literary critic’s point of view unimportant It shows only thatdemand for the poems was high, but that expectations of textual accuracy were

2 INTRODUCTION

not At least up to the mid-eighteenth century, Spenser’s reputation rests mostsecurely on that poem ‘Uncouth unkist’, but once known, ‘beloued of all,embraced of the most, and wondred at of the best’ (No 1a.) Even before the

publication of the Faerie Queene (1590), the Shepheardes Calender appeared

twice more (in 1581 and in 1586), and Harvey had given the publisherBynneman a correspondence between Spenser and himself which advised thepublic, though probably only a small public, that they were to expect yet more ofthe new poet (No 3c)

Both the Shepheardes Calender and the Faerie Queene were the products of

widely collaborative critical effort E.K., if he was Edward Kirke, belongs toSpenser’s Cambridge circle; if he was Fulke Greville (the most interesting ofrecent suggestions),3 then he belongs to the Leicester House circle with which

Spenser was associated—how intimately will never be known The Faerie

Queene had gone through not only Gabriel Harvey’s hands (and changed much

in the process, for Harvey by 1590 [see No 3d] has reversed his earlier judgment

of the poem), but through Abraham Fraunce’s, and if legend can be believed,through Sidney’s as well.4 In any case both Cambridge and London probablycontributed something, and it would be unlikely had Spenser’s friends in Dublinnot seen and commented on it There is unfortunately no weight of evidence onwhich an account of Spenser’s composition of any of his poetry can be based It

is generally assumed that the composition of the Faerie Queene involved a

number of changes in the whole conception of the poem, but precisely whatchanges of conception can hardly be known Everyone admires the ingenuity of

J.W.Bennet’s attempt, in The Evolution of ‘The Faerie Queene’, to determine

Spenser’s compositional procedures; but few critics will now accept herconclusions as definitive.5 There is no way of gauging how Spenser responded tohis public, or what shifts he made to satisfy any private audience Very little hewrites is precisely datable, and very little is known of his public

There is for many people something suspiciously timely about the publications

after 1590 of various collections of minor pieces After the Faerie Queene had

won ‘fauourable passage’, Ponsonby published a volume under the title

Complaints (1591).6 It is a volume elaborately and variously dedicated,

ostensibly, as it is put in the dedication of the Ruines of Time, to the Countess of

Pembroke, to avoid ‘that fowle blot of unthankfulness’ Show and reality in thesematters are nicely distinguished in the century, but the instinctive approval thatone accords to Professor Danby’s brief and suggestive account of Spenser’ssearch for patrons, of his writing poetry ‘to maintain him in place in the body ofthe world’, should be qualified by the recognition that Spenser appears mostconspicuously on the hunt for patrons only after it quite obviously has to beacknowledged that he is a great poet.7 There is a cunning ambiguity in the

dedication of the Tears of the Muses to Lady Strange—‘that by [my] honouring

you they might know me, and by knowing me, they might honour you’.Spenser’s praise of Leicester is strongest after Leicester is dead.8 The

Prothalamion (1596) was presumably commissioned by the Earl of Worcester,

and not simply addressed (in as far as it is addressed to anyone) to his daughters.

The publication of Astrophel (1595) would have been impertinent in a lesser

poet The motions of self-confidence are everywhere The revision (in the

Complaints volume) of his contribution to the Theatre of Van der Noot could

have been motivated only by the mature and famous poet’s desire to blot theinferior efforts of the unknown schoolboy The publication after so long (if the

dedication is to be believed) of the Hymns to Love and Beauty (1596) is

presumably born of the desire to broadcast his better efforts

Jewel Wurtsbaugh has already comprehensively treated the fortunes ofSpenser’s text from 1609.9 A folio edition of the Faerie Queene was published

just over ten years after Spenser’s death by Matthew Lownes (1609), with the

enigmatically announced addition of the Mutabilitie Cantos Apart from that

addition, Lownes’s editorial activity was limited: the Folio is for the most part areprint of the Second Quarto (1596)—though what changes are made do notsuggest to me as they to do Dr Wurtsbaugh that ‘the editor emended as he sawfit’.10 Two years later, in 1611, Lownes published a folio edition of the Works Not

only is the editing in this volume distinctly sloppy, but its printing history iscomplicated Those complications are dealt with by Dr Wurtsbaugh They areinherited by the Second Folio of 1617, and that was the text (re-issued in 1628)which served until 1679 The editing of the Third Folio, printed in that year, hasbeen attributed in part to Dryden, but on no good evidence.11 Its achievement isnot in any case, in the usual sense of the word, editorial What value it must havehad lay in its bringing together a lot of material previously neglected or before

only published separately—Sir James Ware’s edition of A View of the present

State of Ireland (1633), the Spenser-Harvey correspondence, Bathurst’s Latin

translation of the Shepheardes Calender, together with the glossary attached to it

at its first publication (1653), and also the wrongly ascribed Britain’s Ida first

published in 1628 After the Third Folio no edition appeared before Hughes’s of

1715 Hughes’s editorial procedure did not satisfy Dr Johnson, who saw that he

‘perhaps wanted an antiquary’s knowledge of the obsolete words’, butpresumably it was not for that reason that Hughes’s edition did not rouse theinterest of the public if, as Johnson claims, it did not.12 It is to Hughes’s credit,that first among Spenser’s editors, he had thought about the meaning of the text.His emendations are inaccurate and often absurd; but this at least is not whollythe fault of his own limited talents, and he is never, like Bentley with Milton,outrageous

The availability of texts suggests that Spenser was not neglected There ishowever no suggestion of great demand Indeed, compared with that of the

1750s, when five separate editions of the Faerie Queene were published, it may

seem rather small.13 Such matters are difficult to estimate The early demand for

Spenser does not compare with that for, say, Ariosto (of whose Orlando Furioso

there were more than a hundred editions between 1516 and the end of thecentury).14 In respect of the number of editions his work went through, Spenser

does not even compare very well with Shakespeare, whose Works appeared in

4 INTRODUCTION

four folio editions before Rowe’s edition of 1709, while in addition separateplays were published in eighty-five different editions and issues in quarto before

that date On the other hand, J.M.Munro, in his introduction to the Shakespeare

Allusion Book, is prepared to admit that in the same period allusions to Spenser

probably outnumber those to Shakespeare.15 Whether or not that is so—when the

Spenser Allusion Book appears, the evidence will speak for itself—Spenser

certainly attracted more serious attention His status is more like that ofJonson.16 That is, it is probably safe to say that Shakespeare was more popular thaneither Spenser or Jonson, but less reputable—in other words, that the level ofdemand was different

IIITHE PERIOD I579–1600

Tacitus relates that once when some lines from the Aeneid were recited in the

course of a theatrical performance, and Virgil was present, the audience rose totheir feet and bowed towards him ‘as if he were Augustus’.17 No such story isrelated of Spenser, and it is fairly certain that nothing remotely of that ordercould ever have occurred It is true that there is a great buoyancy in Elizabethanaccounts of Spenser: Spenser was apparently adored by his contemporaries.18But the accounts of Spenser in this period come mainly from professional poets.There is no evidence to suggest that he enjoyed a broad fame What is more,

though the criticism does not all come from the areopagoi of Cambridge, or

Leicester House, or Dublin, there is in most of it a sense of shared assumptions,and most of it does come from closed literary circles Its tone is intimate as well

as buoyant

The intimacy of tone is a consequence not only of the accidents of Spenser’sbiography It may follow partly from a particular and forgotten emphasis onSpenser as a love poet The aims of most Elizabethan poets were distinctlylimited: their strain for the most part was lyrical, and when they spread theirwings, it was to attempt the pastoral Outside scholarly circles there was not,moreover, any emphasis on a generic distinction between the two Pastoral

poetry was for the later Elizabethans primarily erotic, and the Shepheardes

Calender was seen principally as a love complaint Spenser, along with Sidney,

contributed to the vogue for pastoral trappings in erotic poetry most readily

observed in Englands Helicon (1600).19

This bias appears to contradict that found in those writers who are by variousaccidents of biography associated personally with Spenser, or in those whosesympathies are most probably in line with Spenser’s own E.K and, following

him, William Webbe take the Shepheardes Calender as a warning against love.

The contradiction is probably only apparent Both parties would have admittedthe other’s points, but each finds a different emphasis useful And among poets,the erotic emphasis is, naturally enough, the more convenient In 1582, WilliamVallans can attempt wholly unerotic pastoral in imitation of Spenser;20 but later

attempts, such as John of Bordeaux (1590?) play up whatever specifically

concerns love.21 The apostrophes to Colin which fill the pastoral poetry of theperiod, even when they acknowledge higher purposes for Spenser’s poetry,

almost always sentimentalize the man ‘Here Colin sits,’ writes Barnabe Barnes,

‘beneath that oaken tree/Eliza singing in his layes.’22 Mostly the higher purposesare passed over silently William Smith’s dedication of Chloris (1596) to Spenser

is addressed to ‘Colin my deere and most entire beloued’ and goes on:

Faine would my muse whom cruell loue hath wronged, Shroud her louelabors under thy protection.23

‘By thee’, Barnfield complains to Cupid, ‘great Collin lost his liberty,’ and when

the same poet offers what he calls the ‘first imitation of the verse of the Faerie

Queene’, it is a love poem he writes, modelled on Spenser’s conceit of

Cynthia.24 No doubt we forget to what extent even the Faerie Queene is intended

as a love poem, and just how much it might have in common with Ralegh’s

Ocean’s Love; but it is no special insight that allows Barnfield to see it That the Amoretti go unmentioned among all this is probably not a circumstance

attributable to their late appearance The first mention of them before Hughes is

in Drummond (No 64), who doubts they are by Spenser they are so bad (a

judgment, which, if it includes the Epithalamion, is unforgivable) The appeal of Spenser as a love poet is obvious In the Shepheardes Calender he transformed himself into a legend That the poem is more than an early sort of Bildungsroman

does not prevent anxious Elizabethan love poets from taking it as such Spenser

is ‘chefe of Shepheardes all’, and so Thomas Edwards sees the whole poem as

‘sweete Affection tun’d in homely layes’ (No 23b)

As the author of the Faerie Queene, Spenser is still for Edwards only the

‘Heroike Parramore of Faerie Land’ (No 23a) Even Ralegh can hint at a

similarity between the Spenser of the Faerie Queene and the Petrarch of the

Rime (No 10) An anonymous verse preserved in a copy of the 1590 Quarto

makes the same point.25 It would seem that what immediately struck a lot ofElizabethans was that they had a new Ariosto, a poet to ‘treat of worthies and ofLadies loue’ But this does not mean that they were ignorant of Spenser’sambitions as a moral or a learned poet, merely that they were not anxious topress the point The inane jingle by Churchyard (No 7b) may indicate how muchwas taken for granted, and Barnfield the sentimentalist also admits the appeal ofthe deep conceit: Spenser is more than Dowland (No 27a) But it is thoseisolated from the preoccupations of the professional poet who first make

elaborately explicit a conception of the Faerie Queene as primarily ethical or allegorical The Roman Catholic Anthony Copley in A Fig for Fortune (1596) turns the machinery, though not the manner of the Faerie Queene, to his own

propagandist ends And the Puritan Francis Rous, on the basis of the same

literary assumptions, works out a quite differently aimed adaptation in Thule, or

Vertues Historie (1598) It is the more intimate perspective which proves more

6 INTRODUCTION

generally congenial, and it is this which allows Spenser’s contemporaries sohappily to classify him along with so many other modern poets In evaluating theachievement of Elizabethan poetry, few now would put the names of Spenserand, say, Daniel alongside each other But Francis Meres for example putstogether as lyric poets Daniel, Drayton, Shakespeare (of the ‘surged sonnets’),Breton and Spenser, and as pastoral poets Spenser, Gosson, Fraunce, and Barnfield(No 29).

The nearer to Spenser’s immediate circle the critics, the less they are inclined

to see him as a model for the fashionable blend of pastoral and erotic They have

at the same time a larger and a more discriminating perception of what his poetry

is about The pretensions evident in E.K.’s prefatory matter direct what they say

of the Shepheardes Calender, as much as does their reading of the poem Webbe

has already been mentioned in this connexion ‘The occasion of his works,’ hesays (No 4), ‘is a warning to other young men, who, being intangled in loue andyouthful vanities, may learne to looke to themselues in time…’ More generally,

it is a work containing ‘many good Morall lessons’, by no means specifically onlove And most interesting of all from Webbe’s point of view is the poem’sexcellence as an example of the poet’s craft: ‘there are in that worke twelue or

thirteene sundry sortes of verses…’ For Webbe, Spenser’s achievement consists

in having put English poetry on a par with Latin and Greek poetry Theocritusand Virgil are now matched by Spenser For Nashe (No 5a), Spenser hasexcelled all the moderns The background of this sometimes oddly chauvinisticemphasis on strictly technical achievement, also evident in the Spenser-Harvey

correspondence, has been examined by R.F.Jones in his The Triumph of the

English Language (1953), to which I refer the interested reader Spenser’s

strictly technical pretensions, and the perhaps too sympathetic applause of many

of his admirers, also explain the note of dissent in writers as close to the poet asSidney (No 133)

The appreciation of the Faerie Queene is much slower to catch on Its

rhetorical beauties were noted before publication by Fraunce (No 134), andperhaps very early imitated by Marlowe.26 But the Shepheardes Calender had a place in the hearts of Spenser’s small public which the Faerie Queene never had.

Campion pretends to be pleased with both-Spenser delights whether writing ofrural landscapes or of the horrors of war.27 But in that little epigram it hadperhaps not occurred to Campion to sense the inappropriateness of the facilejuxtaposition of the earlier and later poems When Sir John Davies praises

‘Colins fayre heroike style’, (Orchestra, st 128) one gets the impression that it is the luxuries of the Shepheardes Calender or of Book VI (where Spenser perhaps

has deliberate recourse to his own legend) which have appealed most Only insuch a context is it appropriate for Daniel to have made a show of rejecting in

Delia the trappings of Spenserian chivalry (No 16a).

‘I can imagine no greater birth…’ Meres (No 29) echoes Propertius and, evenamong those best placed to understand the poem, little beyond that is said Thecommendatory verses which accompany the first edition of the poem certainly

get no further It seems as if it may have overwhelmed and confused its earliestreaders, so that the only accounts of any substance are Spenser’s own in theLetter to Ralegh (No 2c) and that attributed to him by Bryskett (No 48), whosetreatment does presumably reflect Spenser’s own conversation about the poem.There is no indication in any published comment of any familiarity with thepoem, such as is found among its few (and then learned) admirers in theseventeenth century.

Fortunately there is a corrective to those generalizations made on the basis ofpublished comment Professor Hough has put before the public an edition of the

marginalia on the Faerie Queene, written in 1597 by one John Dixon.28 Nothing

to the point is known of Dixon, but it can be assumed that he represents theaverage serious Elizabethan reader The interests reflected in his comments areprosaic, but not extraordinarily so; it is clear however that he was not looking toSpenser as a model for his own love poetry He is apparently confused by thenarrative—Sansfoy is mixed up with Archimago, Guyon with Redcrosse,Florimell with Belphoebe, Malecasta with Duessa, and the like Such confusionsare not without interest, for even allowed that Dixon has unawares fallen intoerror (which is just arguable), they betray not only, as Professor Hough wouldhave it, an indifference to the courtly and romantic aspects of Spenser, but to theliteral structure of the whole poem The other marginalia confirm this ProfessorHough divides them into three categories: the identification of Biblical allusions(in which Dixon anticipates Upton by focusing on the debt to Revelations), themarking of moral characterizations or the moral elucidation of episodes, and theidentification of topical allusions That this last category is especially favouredmay serve as a warning to those modern critics who like to think of it as trivial.The marginalia in Cambridge University library Sel 5.102, and a variety of otherearly marginalia, indicate a similar preoccupation.29 It cannot be accidental that

Carew in one of the few early comparisons of the author of the Faerie Queene

with a classical poet chooses to compare him with Lucan (No 28a)

But it is not, at this period, on such things that the appreciation of Spenserrests For the poets who wrote most of what is written on Spenser, had littleinterest in them Camden relates that at Spenser’s funeral a line of poets threwverses, and their pens with them, into his grave (No 168b) No certain copy ofthose verses has survived, with the only probable exception of a Latin poem byR.H (Richard Harvey?).30 That poem is not printed here since it is so generalized

as hardly to be about Spenser at all There are, however, included in this book anumber of obituary and pseudo-obituary pieces, which in spite of varying widely

in date, reflect much the same attitudes to Spenser Almost without exceptionthey represent Spenser as a pastoralist and a love poet—only Fitzgeoffrey’sepigrams go further Pastoral and elegy do adapt well to each other, but thereasons for the predominance of pastoral imagery are, I suspect, more complex,and relate to the sentimentalism already discussed It is worth pointing out thatthe presence of poets at Spenser’s funeral, and the outburst of obituary versifyingmore or less immediately on his death, is a singular compliment Munro was

8 INTRODUCTION

obliged to note that at Shakespeare’s death ‘the muse shed not one tear’, andJonson did not fare much better.31

IVTHE PERIOD 1600–1660

It is too much to say, as H.E.Cory does, that after 1600 there is a reversal inSpenser’s critical fortunes.32 Most of what was written on Spenser in the earlypart of the seventeenth century, not surprisingly, very much resembles what waswritten in the 1590s Very few of those who talk at all about Spenser are

prepared to talk ill of him If only on the principle of de mortuis nil nisi bonum,

or of the generally observable rise in the reputation (if not the popularity) ofrecently dead poets of admitted stature, that is what one would expect Yet there

is perhaps (and that may be what Cory meant in speaking of the age of reasonfollowing on the age of enthusiasm) some loss of impetus in the appreciation ofSpenser The tone of the criticism fails in spontaneity and intimacy Also itbegins to be more generally discriminating -which means both that it admitsmore reservations, and that it is more careful than was customary for the Spensercriticism of the last decade of the sixteenth century There is some change even

in the tone of what is unambiguously adulatory Generally speaking, however,there is a limit to how often the same thing can be said and still persuade us of itsgenuineness; and there is necessarily a loss of intimacy with Spenser’s manner,and of sympathy with the intellectual atmosphere in which he wrote Moreover,

it is commonplace that there was some sort of failure of confidence in theintellectual life of the early seventeenth century

There are two signs of this loss of impetus First, those poets, such as WilliamBrowne (see No 60) or Phineas Fletcher (see No 77), who pretend allegiance toSpenser and Spenser’s manner do not write like him The erotic pastoralists ofthe late sixteenth century did not write like Spenser either; but then, they made

no elaborate claims to, and they had no devious reasons for believing themselvesSpenser’s heirs The notions of influence and imitation are notoriously difficult:even decisions about what the terms ought to mean are embarrassing It should

be clear however that the so-called Spenserians of the earlier seventeenth centuryare engaged on problems quite distinct from Spenser’s, and that their debt is onlyindirect Historically their position prevented them from being comprehensivelyinterested in Spenser: the new poetry had been forged, and the old problemssolved For the same reason it is in particular doubtful how far Spenser can besaid to have contributed to the vogue for mellifluous writing Nothing that thepoets of the earlier part of the century would have wanted to learn from Spenser

as practitioners of verse, was not already current Besides, Daniel is at least as

mellifluous as Spenser, and Elizabeth Cooper (of the Muses Library) was right to

note that it was Spenser and Fairfax together who ‘opened to us a new World ofOrnament, Elegance, and Taste’.33 Fairfax is in fact a good deal more elegant andtasteful than Spenser, and one cannot but feel that seventeenth-century fine

writing owes considerably more to him It is Spenser, however, who in theimagination of his successors remains the type of the elegant and tasteful poet Inone area, Spenser’s influence would be obvious were it admitted But thearchaism which is recognized as the distinguishing characteristic of Spenser’sstyle is almost everywhere absent in his supposed imitators It is presentsometimes, but where it is, the suspicion that Spenser’s imitators are at somedistance from Spenser is only confirmed, for it is used sporadically andmechanically That is, Spenser’s imitators parade debts that are only superficially

owed William Bedell’s A Protestant Memorial (1605)—a poem which Joseph

Hall thinks in Spenser’s mould,34 Britannia’s Pastorall of William Browne (1613–16), Richard Niccols’s The Cuckow (1607),35 the poetry of both theFletchers,36 take over features of the movement of Spenser’s verse, and features

of the diction; but they do so either for incidental convenience, or sentimentally.Often those writers are only in search of the obviously musical The samemixture of convenience (often one suspects laziness) and sentimentality ismanifest in the adaptation of descriptive passages from Spenser Nathaniel Baxterfor example is not, to adapt T.S.Eliot’s phrase, mature in his theft of Spenser’sdescription of Belphoebe;37 Robert Aylett’s persistent lifting of whole sections

of the Faerie Queene, only to vulgarize them, has at least made him useful to a

recent critic of Book V.38 Drayton, whom Douglas Bush may rightly have called

‘the chief of Spenser’s heirs’ exhibits, superficially, little dependence on him.39

In general, the attempts to take over structural features of Spenser’s work, or

to take over his use of allegory, are no more seriously ambitious Everything, as

in Phineas Fletcher’s Purple Island (1633) is at once exaggerated and on a

smaller scale Indeed the Spenserian allegories of the seventeenth century havethis in common, that they are strained beyond the Spenserian manner, and thatthey are written for an audience more learned or more anxious to learn than thatwhich might safely approach Spenser himself The allegory is almost exclusivelyemblematic (Spenser did, it should be remembered, enter the emblem books),40and there is rarely supporting narrative Moreover, perhaps as a consequence ofthe kind of criticism that Spenser attracted in the period, those allegories havemore the quality of fences around philosophy than of pleasant paths to it HenryMore’s work is the most obvious case in point here The masque also, with itselaborate allegorical apparatus, lent itself easily to the opportunity of plagiarizingSpenser; and here too the borrowing was mechanical or careless and the appealnecessarily narrow.41

By his imitators, Spenser is made more polite than he is or more obviouslyabstruse than he is That is the first sign of loss of contact with the spirit ofSpenser The second sign is corollary Not really wanting to learn anything fromSpenser, or not being able to, some of his admirers fall into nostalgia Cory detectedthis in Joseph Hall;42 I do not But it is evident in some of the obituary material—this sense, as Boswell puts it in his report of Johnson’s death, that a space hasbeen created which nothing can fill The less strictly obituary the material, themore it is free to develop this line in specific directions It comes out centrally in

10 INTRODUCTION

some places The author of Vindiciae Virgilianae, for example, calls up out of

the past poets to mend the present state of poetry: Spenser is among them (No.76) It comes out incidentally in other places Robert Dallyngton wishes thatSpenser were alive to write on the rivers of France for him.43 Richard Niccols, inlamenting Elizabeth’s death, turns to regret the loss of Spenser.44 Robert Tofteheads some verses with apology that Sidney or Spenser would have done thembetter.45 E.G., in his defence of women, acknowledges the superiority of others’treatment, beginning with Homer’s and ending with Spenser’s.46 Suchexpressions of inadequacy are common in this form In the end, the empty spacewas either forgotten about or filled But before Milton there was hardly any onewho could fill it Sylvester and Cowley were both possible candidates, butneither was seriously taken up The mature Dryden treats his youthful preferencefor Sylvester over Spenser as folly (No 100b) It is difficult perhaps todistinguish between nostalgia specifically for Spenser and nostalgia forSpenser’s time The latter strain is never explicit, but the complaint against morerecent poets’ inability to write like Spenser, is to that extent fatuous, that had itbeen possible it would not have been desirable

This failure of genuine sympathy allows a special kind of discrimination todevelop But here it is not the dissent which is most obvious or most interesting.What is remarkable about the mass of comment on Spenser in this period is theway in which it shows the growth of his status as a classic author There is novery good evidence that Spenser saw himself as an English Virgil, though he

contrived his career to resemble Virgil’s and regularly in the Faerie Queene

courts the comparison, and when he planned to overgo Ariosto, presumably hemeant in the direction of Virgil But posthumously, he was regularly honouredwith the comparison Often it is only a lazy tribute, as in the obituary verses ofWeever (No 31) or in Edmund Johnson’s trivial piece of Pythagoreanism,

‘Virgil’s ghost did wend To Spenser’s lodge’;47 and it is no very exactcharacterization of the Water-Poet’s to say that Spenser was an exact imitator ofVirgil, for he thought that Chaucer was as well.48 But with Gill (No 67), whocontrives a comparison of Spenser and Homer which sounds like Scaliger’s ofVirgil and Homer, it takes on meaning With Digby it flowers Digby in front ofSpenser not only identifies himself with Scaliger in front of Virgil (No 71a), but

it is he who imports into Spenserian scholarship the microscopic criticism (No.71b) which English readers would associate with the traditions of Virgilianscholarship Unfortunately, Digby employed his talents in this way only once;and still more unfortunately, he had no worthy successor before Upton

Other signs of Spenser’s classic status are however available The scholarship

of Spenser’s seventeenth-century editors is not, as Wursbaugh has shown, of thehighest But that he had editors at all is something It is a small thing that his firsteditor Lownes should have troubled to secure missing material, or that in 1628Walkley should have put out under Spenser’s name a poem by Phineas Fletcher

in the belief (presumably) that it was missing material That Ware, a morerespectable scholar, should have published a book written thirty-seven years

before, no longer (as he admits) wholly relevant to the Irish problem (No 169)

or that a Life should have been attached as early as 1679 to the poet’s Works(No 174): those facts, however trivial in themselves, presuppose what may becalled an academic interest in Spenser With the elaborate apparatus that

accompanied the Shepheardes Calender, Spenser had announced himself as a

poet with academic pretensions It remained for those pretensions to be takenseriously by a wide public By Ware they were, and apparently they were by the

editors of the Third Folio It is also worth noting here that the Shepheardes

Calender appears to have been used as material for Latin translation exercises,

though I think it is making a lot of little to suppose that those exercises wereeither formal or regular.49

More singular, Spenser is used from an early date, after the mediaeval fashion,

as a sort of auctor To make this plain I have included in the volume a number of

passages the critical interest of which is only secondary The passages fromAustin for example (No 80) are of very little worth; it is merely interesting that

he has thought it worth his while to echo Spenser while making a theologicalpoint, and to quote him while making a mystical one about the human body.Burton (No 66) uses Spenser as a supporting authority on human psychology,Selden (No 18f) on British history, Heylyn on St George (No 73a) Very earlyindeed, in 1602, Samuel Rowlands is using Spenser to consolidatecommonplaces or as a source of proverbs.50 Edmund Bolton thinks it worthwhile citing Spenser ‘in his time, the most learned poet of England’, if only tocontradict him, on the site of Boadicea’s defeat.51 John Speed cites him on thequestion of whether or not England was once joined to the Continent.52 Andthere are many represented on the following pages who are prepared to assure

their readers that the Faerie Queene is a compendium of moral law and

philosophical lore When Henry Bold calls him ‘our Platonicke Spenser’ he onlyechoes the opinion of Platonist Cambridge.53

A third indication, already partly suggested, is the extent to which Spenserwas in principle and not in practice imitated The inadequacy of seventeenth-century imitations of Spenser may be accounted for simply by a loss offamiliarity with Spenserian habits of mind, but the reasons for a show ofimitation are best seen in terms of the glamour of obvious recourse to classicprecedent More striking yet is the way in which Spenser is adapted or parodied

Both the Pilgrimage to Parnassus and Pasquils Palinodia parody lines from

Spenser.54 The early more extended efforts by Copley and Rous have beenmentioned By mid-century a number are available The anonymously edited

canto from Book V, The Fairy Leveller (1649), is one Sheppard’s Fairy King (see No 84) is another Knevett’s topically oriented Supplement is yet another

(see No 79) Richard Brathwait, writing under the pseudonym Pamphilus

Hesychius, wrote the only deliberately funny parody of the matter of the Faerie

Queene of which I know, in the History of Moderation (1669) Such

compendious and various tribute is remarkable

12 INTRODUCTION

Spenser had aspired to be a classic and his admirers took him as one It wasprobably his reception as much as his aspirations which exposed Spenser toattack from those with severer notions of what a classic should be To judge fromthe Letter to Ralegh, Spenser regarded the work of Homer, Virgil, Ariosto, andTasso, as a more or less homo-geneous body of heroic poetry, and his immediatesuccessors followed him in this There are reasons for their view other than lack

of discrimination, but since they belong largely to the history of Italian literarycriticism they cannot be gone into here.55 His critics of the mid-seventeenthcentury were not by and large prepared to accept the earlier view By no obviousformal criteria is Spenser comparable with Virgil, and Harvey’s objection to what

is assumed to have been an early draft of the Faerie Queene (No 3c) will hold

for later drafts as well

There is from this particular point of view an interesting reversal in Spenser’s

critical fortunes The author of the Pilgrimage to Parnassus hints at some early

quarrel of the poets in which Spenser is set against Shakespeare.56 How far thequarrel was particularized it is impossible to know Most probably it was aquarrel about categories of author rather than authors: about the opposition oflearned poetry and native wood notes wild Fifty years later this quarrel is in some

way still alive, for in Samuel Holland’s Don Zara (No 93), Spenser is acclaimed

by one party of poets—the learned party—and Shakespeare by the other If so,Holland’s conceptions had outlived their proper time This early quarrel mustsoon have been forgotten, and another takes its place It is easier to see Spenser,

in the context of the seventeenth-century critical emphasis on design, as abarbarous and gothic poet than as a learned one The results of his learning are,except incidentally, not immediately apparent; those of his adherence to formallycorrupt models and absurd matter on the other hand are In consequence it is fromthe neo-classical critics that comes the most stable opposition to Spenser.Spenser becomes at once the object of awe, and a cause for regret Rymerdeclared his admiration, but is obliged to put on record a principled disapproval

of Spenser’s manner (No 101) That particular combination is commonplace Thesternest censures are generally on his language, but only because it is Spenser’slanguage which is most conspicuously deviant That will however be discussedlater It is more difficult to know what to make of Drummond’s report that aswell as disliking Spenser’s manner, Jonson objected to his matter (No 61b) AsDrummond states it, it sounds like total condemnation As such it would make

sense At that date, an objection to the matter of the Faerie Queene presumably

represents an attack on its ‘fabulousness’ and reflects an opinion something likeFanshawe’s (No 92) For some, Spenser was not enough of a Lucan FromJonson, however, the objection sounds like posed overstatement designed toexcite Drummond’s interest in literary scandal

There are two classes of reader which Spenser’s ‘fabulousness’ does notdiscomfit The first consists of those who read him just for the story, or moregenerally, for the surface appeal ; the second consists of those who do not readhim for the story at all When a child, it was for the story that Cowley read the

Faerie Queene, and it is of note that he had no understanding at that time of why

his mother, who read exclusively in devotional literature, should have had it

among her books (No 87b) Charles I apparently read the Faerie Queene ‘for

alleviating his spirits after serious study’.57 Sir Aston Cockayne thinks that

Faerie Queene, along with other romantic and erotic literature, is unsuitable

reading for the inexpert (No 94c) Edmund Gayton classes the Faerie Queene as

a product of strictly native wit and fancy.58 The element of fairy tale or romance

in the Faerie Queene is strong, and it can be enjoyed in isolation This approach

to the poem is however isolated from the main critical currents of the century, though it does come into its own later In this earlier period articulatereaders of the second category well outnumber those of the first Spenser’s poem

mid-as well mid-as being enjoyable mid-as romance also invites moral interpretation Thattendency to read almost exclusively as moral allegory, observable from the first,increases throughout the century Milton (No 74), and More (No 82) even as achild, both celebrate Spenser’s authority as a moralist, or as a source of arcane

knowledge Put to such uses it hardly matters that the Faerie Queene is gothic or the Shepheardes Calender quaint It might not have mattered at all had not

Spenser achieved that classic status of which we have spoken Since he had, itbecomes possible for such writers as Lisle (No 70), or Reynolds (No 75), orTemple (No 112) to approve the doctrine, but not the allegory

That steady disapproval of the neo-classical critics can best be explained interms of expectations Earlier in the progress of Spenser’s critical fortunes suchobjections had no ground in which to root themselves As long as Spenser wasclassed with his contemporaries (Daniel, Drayton, and the like), or even withChaucer, then the criteria by which he was estimated were necessarily irregular.Gervase Markham sees Spenser’s relation to Chaucer as being like Virgil’s toHomer or Ariosto’s to Boiardo: that is, more polite and more correct, but notabsolutely polite and correct E.G does not even trouble with those distinctions:Chaucer and Spenser are comparable because both are learned poets

—‘Chaucer’s learned soule in Spencer sung.’59 Edward Leigh thinks Chaucer, as

an English Homer, is superior to Spenser, and in preferring invention to judgment,reveals the very contrary of a neo-classical bias.60 Jonson is again exceptional

Carpenter believes that the appearance, in The Golden Age Restored, of Spenser

along with Chaucer, Gower and Lydgate, is high evidence of his poeticalcanonization.61 In view of Jonson’s remarks elsewhere, the compliment is a littletwo-edged

The comparison with Virgil, however, immediately revealed Spenser’s formaldeficiences For this reason it is in the end abandoned It proved in too manyrespects unsatisfactory, and the passing years diminished its intelligibility Asearly as 1631 Robert Henderson sub-stitutes Ariosto for Virgil as the standard bywhich Spenser is to be measured.62 It is repeated in the 1650s by R.C (No 89a).Thereafter critics sympathetic to Spenser as well as unsympathetic class him withItalian rather than with the ancient poets The consequences of this procedure aremore clearly seen in the period after 1660

14 INTRODUCTION

VTHE PERIOD 1660–17I5There are few critics after the Restoration who are prepared to accept Spenser as

a poet in the Virgilian mould, and the Ariostan standard was generally adopted.This standard is unfortunately rendered unstable by the beginnings of a moregeneral literary quarrel For while the battle of the Ancients and the Modernswas not formally open in England before the 1690s, Wotton was not provokedsimply by Temple, and the debate was not worked up out of the air Before that,there were those critics who were satisfied with the literary autonomy of themoderns, and there were those who would quite arbitrarily have preferred theirSpenser to be more like Virgil Rymer, whose reputation suffers a little unjustly

on account of his excesses, takes the comparison with Ariosto to be ipso facto

condemnation (No 101) Though Rymer concedes a good deal to Spenser, hisremains the severest possible neo-classical line Though hardly anyone can haveadmired Spenser more, Dryden follows it: ‘Spenser wanted only to have read the

Rules of Bossu ; for no Man was Born with a greater Genius, or had more

Knowledge to support it.’ (No 100f.) Even earlier, in 1644, when the author of

Vindex Anglicus is anxious to assert the comparability of English and ancient

poetry, he can find it in himself to compare Spenser only with Lucan63—he mayhowever, only have been thoughtlessly following Carew Among the ModernsSpenser might have found readier support had he been more obviously or more

consistently a Christian poet John Worthington regrets the loss of his Canticles

(No 95); Edward Howard (No 111) and More (No 82) allow him the advantage

of being a Christian poet But, as Dennis points out (No 118), even here Spenserdamned himself by mixing his Christianity with the vestiges of paganism Forsuch as Temple, to be a Christian poet was automatically to be disadvantaged(No 112) Towards the end of the century, Matthew Morgan calls up the image

of Spenser

Depressed when living, slighted now he’s dead.64

Yet to a poet of Spenser’s obvious virtues, concessions had to be made

Even critics as confident of their own rightness as those of the laterseventeenth century, were permitted by the growth of a primitive sort of literaryhistoricism to ‘place’ Spenser as the product of imperfect time, and his poetry asthe product of imperfect principles A progress from Chaucer to Spenser andbeyond is worked out, as in Denham’s elegy on Cowley (No 96) or as in Dryden:

‘Even after Chaucer, there was a Spenser, a Harrington, a Fairfax, before Waller

and Benham were in being’ (No 100g) Enfin Malherbe vint, but Spenser was no

Malherbe He does not in fact come out of this placing process particularly well.Atterbury’s astonishment at the recognition that Spenser precedes Waller by onlyfifty years is a sign of how badly he can come out of it (No 156) Waller is nowunderrated, but not so far abused that Atterbury’s expression of those notions

cannot properly be seen as wrong headed Once Paradise Lost was published, the

idea of a literary progress was once more reinforced, but again at Spenser’sexpense

Milton was held to be at once ethically and formally superior to Spenser

Paradise Lost was not the perfect neo-classical poem, but it was a closer

approximation to it than was the Faerie Queene Patrick Hume’s notes on

Paradise Lost for example, where it is a question of a borrowing from Spenser,

do not fail to point out the superiority of Milton’s version (No 116) And in anage that rediscovered the sublime, Leonard Welsted in his translation ofLonginus can make more use of Milton than of the earlier poet (No 128).But except in the imagination of partisans one poet does not supersede another.The failure of the effort to associate Spenser with the ancients, and hisbetterment in those categories into which his critics had attempted to fit him, led

to a revaluation of Spenser’s achievement among those not concerned with those

paragoni, in quite different terms.

Spenser’s reputation as a pastoral poet remained throughout the period up to

1715 more or less unimpaired Congreve in 1695 thinks it not inappropriate to

set ‘British Colins mourning Muse’ alongside ‘the Sicilian Bard, or the Mantuan

Swain’.65 Cotton’s Poems of 1689 show the influence of Spenser still working strongly Steele in two Guardian papers of 1713—the papers which provoked

Pope—considers that both Spenser and Philips have ‘copied and improved thebeauties of the Ancients’.66 Pope’s reply to those papers, or his adolescent

criticism of Spenser in the Preface to his own Pastorals, are not at bottom attacks

on Spenser but on Philips (Nos 124, 167) His letter to Hughes better indicateshis attitude: ‘Spenser has ever been a favourite poet to me; he is like a mistress,whose faults we see, but love her with them all.’67 Gay’s parody of Spenser’s

pastoral manner in the Shepherd’s Week (1714) is at least good-humoured.

Woodford makes explicit his preference for the minor poems (No 103) So far isSpenser’s reputation as a pastoralist his strength, that by 1717 Thomas Purney

attempts a justification of the Faerie Queene as a pastoral poem, perhaps on a

cue from Hughes.68

The Faerie Queene required some justification in other than epic terms.

Towards the end of the century Spenser hardly counted at all as an heroic poet Afew scattered references are available which suggest that some estimation of him

is going on almost in the terms of his contemporaries Marvell alludes to Spenser

as the singer ‘In Lofty Notes [of] Tudor’s blest Race’.69 And while Evelyn readsChaucer for his ‘facetious Style’, he reads Spenser as the celebrator of Elizabeth

‘Who aw’d the French, and did the Spaniard tame’.70 The Athenian Mercury XII

(1693) recommends Spenser as a heroic poet, but while the author of the articlemay have had good taste, he had not strict taste, for he recommends as the best

translation of the Aeneid that by Gavin Douglas.71 Then there are signs that a

distinction was drawn between heroic and epic poetry, for in The Journal from

Parnassus of 1688,72 the ‘Examination of Heroics was assigned to Spenser: of

Epics and Pindarics to Mr Waller’ One gets the impression that the Faerie

16 INTRODUCTION

Queene is being treated as something quite distinct from what it pretends to be,

that it was at best being treated as heroic romance

Unexpectedly two lines of thought on Spenser come together The approval of

the Faerie Queene as romance and the rejection of its epic pretensions allow the

new revaluation Spenser’s sensuousness and his romance come into their own,and are made respectable Dryden had said, ‘If the design be good and thedraught be true, the Colouring is the first beauty that strikes the eye.’73 After

1700 it hardly seems to matter what the design is like, it is the colouring thatstrikes the eye There begins the concentrated emphasis on the specificallypictorial which remains even in this century Spenser had always, as is clear fromthe character of early imitations of him, been regarded as a master of descriptivewriting Before the end of the sixteenth century Carew bows to Spenser andSidney as such (No 28b), and Richard Haydocke, the English translator ofLomazzo, recommends English painters to the reading of Sidney, Spenser andDaniel.74 The pictorial emphasis had always been possible But there is new

approval in the tone of Spence’s report of the old lady’s account of the Faerie

Queene as a gallery of pictures Truly, it may as well have been nothing but

that.75

Addison and Steele combine with an interest in the pictorial, an interest inallegory as such Now this latter interest (manifested for example in Addison’sdeclaration of a project to write an allegory in the manner of Spenser)76 doesallow Spenser the virtues of seriousness, without tying the critic to any

estimation of his poetry in strictly generic terms The Faerie Queene is allowed

to be serious, without being epic Addison approves the allegory of Sin andDeath in Milton but thinks it unsuitable for epic (No 114d) The criteria forseriousness are no longer formal, and this is from one point of view a great stepforward Addison does not deny Spenser’s debt to the Italians, but he does makeclear that Spenser is not entirely depraved by them: he is free, as he points out,from their use of false wit (No 114b) These are novel moves in the game of

comparisons They make Spenser, a poet sui generis.

All this Hughes develops (No 131) It is his virtue to have made explicit thetendencies apparent in the criticism of the past fifty years, to have pulled theminto order, and to have made sense of them It would be difficult to overestimatehis particular debt to Addison or Steele All systems of literary classification are

for practical purposes abandoned All attempts to fit the Faerie Queene to the

pattern of epic or to the pattern of romance are rejected Spenser is estimated onthe basis only of what Hughes finds in him—his fine morality, his noblespeeches, his beautiful allegories and most of all his pictorial sense Hughes isthe first modern critic of Spenser There is no room here to estimate whatdamage he may have done

VILANGUAGEComments on Spenser’s language, where not part of more broadly basedcomment have been excluded from the period division, partly because they can bemore conveniently consulted if printed separately, partly because their tenor isindependent of the fluctuations that mark general opinion on Spenser.

It is E.K who determines what course the discussion will take (No 1a) When

he first brings up for discussion Spenser’s archaizing procedures, he is aware ofpossible dissent from his own heartily expressed approval Valla had objected toarchaism in Livy, others to archaism in Sallust But he considers ‘that thoseancient solemne wordes are a great ornament, both in the one and in the other.’And so it will be in Spenser The opinion is defended on a variety of grounds,not all wholly compatible: it suits the decorum of pastoral to use old words, the oldword lends gravity to utterance, the common word sets off the uncommon,English is purified by the use of pure Saxon Subsequent discussion has alwaysthe character of a reshuffling of those terms It is almost always very abstract—

no one before this century thought to examine thoroughly the precise quality ofSpenser’s archaism; and it usually involves generalized praise or blame ofSpenser’s mode of affectation rather than discussion of how exactly it operates inSpenser’s poetry Francis Beaumont simply follows and quotes E.K (No 140),Everard Guilpin states both sides of the case (No 142), but in E.K.’s terms; SirPhilip Sidney, oddly ungrateful for a dedicatee, states only the case againstarchaism (No 133) The viability of both points of view is illustrated by thesurvival of the same argument into the age of Philips and Pope (No 167) IfAmbrose Philips should be thought too weak-minded an advocate of archaism tomatter, then perhaps Oldham (No 154) or Bentley (No 161) will not In practiceOldham or Bentley might have thought it unmannerly to affect archaism, butthey understand the principle Pope, one suspects, only affects astonishment atSpenser’s language It is difficult to believe that he is genuinely asuncomprehending as Edward Howard (No 151) or Sir Thomas Culpepper (No.152)

That there was some genuine difficulty even in understanding Spenser issuggested by the publication of a glossary along with Bathurst’s version of the

Shepheardes Calender in 1653, or the appearance of words from Spenser in John

Ray’s A Collection of English Words not generally used (1674) and Thomas

Jackson does make an explicit complaint to that effect.77 Hughes in fact shows inhis emendations that he did not exactly understand the old words, but a failure ofexact understanding seldom provokes general consternation Spenser’s language

is so often attacked simply because it is that feature of his writing mostsusceptible of attack Dillingham notes in his preface to Bathurst that the

Shepheardes Calender in English is a poem ‘cum barba,’ and Fanshawe echoes

him, again comparing the original with the fluency of Bathurst’s Latin, that it is

‘a Poem, which the Author made it his businesse to cloathe in rugged English’.78

18 INTRODUCTION